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Friends Forever​/​Gang Wizard Split

by Gang Wizard

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1.
That's a Pretty Big Fucking Lake You Got There, Africa 05:23
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2.
I Don't Want To Take a Bath 03:10
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3.
Freeway 09:43
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4.
New Soundtrack To the Ring 00:09
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about

This CD is an enhanced re-issue of a messy face-off between two of the underground's most gloriously disastrous musical groups: the ironically defunct Friends Forever, and the cryptic west coast feedback cult, Gang Wizard. Both bands share a loud love of total chaos, improvisational collisions, and uber-enthusiastic performance tactics, and neither of them fears crossing that divide into stupidity. Naturally, this results in their shows and recordings usually being ear-shreddingly alive or mind-numbingly indulgent. Or, as is vastly more frequent, both. This split CD - released on Burbank's own Deathbomb Arc Records (which is run by Brian Miller, one of Gang Wizard's five guitarists) - flip-flops between inspired explosions and bored squalls so often it eventually becomes pointless to distinguish the two.

The final frontiers Gang Wizard traverse are vastly less literal than those of FF’s deep space stargazing, but intensely more harrowing and isolating. That’s a Pretty Big Fucking Lake You Got There, Africa is one massive avalanche of burning boulders and poisonous gasses, rumbling, dense, and destructive. Their “turn-on-8-amps-and-run-around-screaming-whatever” approach to free-rock occasionally coalesces into tectonic riffs and (almost) premeditated-sounding leads, especially on “I Don’t Want to Take a Bath” and “Freeway,” the latter of which even has a chorus (an absolute rarity in GW’s world). Their rotating membership and hostile improv make for some difficult listening, but there’s definitely an anti-method to the madness, and it’s not without its car-crash charisma (apparently Thurston Moore felt so too, since he released a GW LP, Jekyll Loves Hyde, on Ecstatic Peace last year). Nowhere is their gang-mentality wizardry more black-magical than on the album’s last track, “New Soundtrack to The Ring.” A hurtling, three-chord train of screech, wind, and metal that gradually grinds into sparks and lava, then utterly implodes, only to somehow come marching back out of the wreckage, mangled and crushing and ploddingly defiant. Moments like this make the disc. Too bad they’re buried so deep - or lost in space.

credits

released January 1, 2004

Deathbomb Arc ‎– DBA024CD

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Gang Wizard Long Beach, California

Gang Wizard started in 1995 and is still alive today in Long Beach California having undergone dozens of personnel changes over the years.

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